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Thursday, January 27, 2011

When was the last time you heard a guitar solo from the stage of the Empty Bottle? Honestly, I’m not sure if I ever had before last night. Dave Hartley could apparently feel the tension in the crowd, and halfway through his set apologized, “sorry for all of the guitar solos.” His jams weren’t exactly the Carlos Santana brand, but closer to John Fahey’s. So in other words, he didn’t really have to apologize to us.

Hartley was performing songs from his latest project for Secretly Canadian, Nightlands. Perhaps better known as the bassist for his full-time band, The War on Drugs, Hartley’s new project is less Springsteen-meets-Arcade Fire and more Eno-meets-Fleet Foxes.

Playing just his fourth show, Hartley’s Chicago set began with a few songs alone with his acoustic guitar and some drum machine samples. Apparently having already mastered looping effects, Hartley was maintaining a strong vocal presence without any accompaniment, but opening act Houses joined him for the final two thirds of his set anyway. They brought with them a mandolin, louder percussion, and a noisier electric guitar. Live drumming was essential to Suzerain, the highlight of Nightlands’ debut full-length, Forget the Mantra. And the additional set of voices enabled even more dynamic harmonies, especially for their chorally exultant closer, 300 Clouds.

The Empty Bottle’s stringed Christmas lights softly accented Nightlands’ dreamy compositions, but the visual supplements were strongest at Hartley’s merch table. Hartley sold his 2010 full-length and a tour-only 7-inch called All the Way, both of which feature cover art by modernist architect Paul Rudolph. Rudolph’s art looks like something you’d find in an old LIFE magazine article from the 60s’ about what they think the future might look like in the year 2000. The wistful ambitiousness of both artists is complementary and strangely enchanting.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Not even February and the hot 2011 albums are already dropping. New music from Destroyer, Deerhoof, Parts & Labor and Akron/Family showcased my shift last night. But there's so much more on the way. Stay tuned for new Low, Wire, and Mogwai in the weeks to come, along with the new artists that will surprise all of us. Boy, I love CHIRP. We celebrated one year of live online broadcasting this month, and it feels like we've garnered the support of the entire music scene in Chicago over the past 12 months. I know that 2011 will only bring bigger and better things, so keep supporting the station. Chicago has needed this for years. What a sigh of relief to finally have a station we can be proud of.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

I should have done this for my night at The Burlington too, but from now on I'll make sure to post my set lists on this blog. Just for general record keeping. Last night I was at darkroom for an hour and a half. My first Friday night DJing at a legit club. Small crowd due to 0 degree temps and short notice promotion, but the few dozen people who showed up danced anyway. Here's what happened:

Tom Ze - Filho Do Pato

John Mayer - I Don't Trust Myself With Loving You

Notorious BIG - Big Poppa

Paul Young - Every Time You Go Away

(you wouldn't believe how fun the mashup of those three songs is. Come out to my next night and I'll do it again.)

Sneaker Pimps - 6 Underground

Out Hud - 2005: A Face Odyssey

CFCF - You Hear Colours

Big Boi - Tangerine

Toro y Moi - Low Shoulder

Arcade Fire - Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)

GusGus - Polyesterday

The xx - Intro

Al Green - Love and Happiness

HEALTH - Nice Girls (Little Loud Remix)

Mount Kimbie - Before I Move Off

Dennis Brown - At the Foot of the Mountain

Genesis - I Can't Dance

CFCF - Big Love

Chicago Bulls theme

Daft Punk - Da Funk

Public Enemy - Bring the Noise

Herbert - Something Isn't Right

Robyn - Hang With Me

Cut Copy - Take Me Over (my favorite song of the night. Nobody knew what it was. But it's been stuck in my head for the past two weeks and it felt great to play it for a crowd. So fun.)

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Come to darkroom in Ukrainian Village this Friday night. I'm DJing, and there's no cover. You might hear some of these songs I played on CHIRP last night. Bring friends. It's the weekend in Chicago. Let's enjoy ourselves.

12:03AMDisappears Halo from Guider (kranky)

12:06AMIggy Pop Neighborhood Threat from Lust For Life (RCA)

12:09AMDinosaur Jr. The Wagon from Green Mind (Sire)

12:16AMThe New Pornographers The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism from Mass Romantic (Mint)

Monday, January 17, 2011

Happy MLK Day people. Enjoy the day off. Think about peace. Pray for it if you need it.

And here's my announcement. I'm DJing at darkroom in Ukrainian Village this Friday. Maybe you guessed that from the title. It's true. From 9pm to 2am, I'll be playing tunes with a couple other DJs throughout the night.

So if you still feel bad about missing my first gig at The Burlington last month, here's your chance for redemption.

No pressure of course. There's no cover and it'll just be a fun time more than anything. Don't come just to appease me, come to darkroom if you want to feel good on a Friday night in Chicago.

Honestly, I haven't been to this place before. But I've heard that it's cool. Local photographers' work is showcased on the walls apparently ("dark room." get it?).

Alright that's it for now. Hope to see some familiar faces this Friday. Thanks!

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

I usually post something other than just CHIRP playlists on this blog, but last week was the worst writing week I've had in over a year. On Thursday my tooth began to ache. Every three hours I was waking up with pain in my jaw. Turns out I just needed a double root canal. So that happened yesterday, and then I dedicated my show to the horrific event. Notice the themed music below:

12:03AMSandwell District Falling the Same Way from Feed-Forward (Sandwell District)

12:09AMEluvium Leaves Eclipse the Night from The Motion Makes Me Last (Temporary Residence)

Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Donald Kaufman reminded us that, "There hasn't been a new film genre since Fellini invented the mockumentary." But we need an addendum to that scene of Adaptation. In the past year, two movies were released that blurred the lines between documentary and mockumentary. The more popular was I'm Still Here, the "hoax" film about Joaquin Phoenix's downward spiral out of show-business. The more interesting film was Blood Into Wine, the story about how Tool's Maynard James Keenan shifted his attention away from rock and roll and decided to create a winery in the Arizona desert.

Neither of these films are documentaries in the traditional sense. Ken Burns probably wouldn't endorse either of them. Documentaries, as Michael Moore boldly claimed when he won his Oscar, deal with non-fiction. I'm Still Here and Blood Into Wine are unclear in where their "non-fiction" is based. And yet, they are not exactly Guestian mockumentaries either. There is reality inherent in these films, in spite of vehemently false aspects. Let's call this new genre, the meta-mock.

Postmodernism triggered a self-conscious ambiguity in film. Zizek asserted that the virtual is now the reality, and he's right. Hence the popularity of reality television, online social networks, and this new film genre that straddles the fence of documentary and mockumentary. Due to this paradoxical genre's simultaneously real-yet-false qualities, the virtual is more real in a meta-mock than the "non-fiction" Bowling For Columbine was.

Meta-mock is like the filmic version of Kierkegaard's philosophy: truth is subjectivity. Just as Nietzsche and Sartre would be nothing without the existential groundwork of Kierkegaard, I'm Still Here and Blood Into Wine probably would not exist without the trailblazing of Werner Herzog. He directs both fictional and non-fictional (documentary) films, but the latter are never straight-forward. Herzog has a keen sense of what makes a subject interesting, and may linger on it for over an hour, without narration. However, he is never afraid to insert his own opinion into a story. His own subjectivity may enhance the overall quality of the film.

In Grizzly Man, Herzog decides to not reveal the video or audio of Timothy Treadwell's bear mauling. He insists that it is too gruesome, and must not be revealed to the world. He even says that the tape should be destroyed.

What nerve.

To have non-fictional material that documents a major event in the film, and to throw it away. For a "documentary" filmmaker, how can Herzog make such a decision?

Now we can begin to see the blend. Before, we assumed that all documentaries were true, and that all mockumentaries were jokes. Meta-mock is intentionally indeterminate, and would rather leave questions out there for us to ask for ourselves than give us objective information. Herzog did not want to tell us what happened in Treadwell's final breathing moments, he wanted us to imagine it instead. What is this material that is so horrific that it cannot even be seen or heard on film? Truth is subjectivity.

In Adaptation, a movie that is neither a documentary or mockumentary, but is meta-aware of its guile, Charlie Kaufman toys with what a film means to reality. Is it meaningful? Is it true? What do we come away with in the end if not a fleeting feeling of being entertained? In meta-mock, these questions are cornerstones, but are altogether more introspective. Appropriate to their content, the major theme in both I'm Still Here and Blood Into Wine is self-discovery.

I'm Still Here is about one man: Joaquin Phoenix. His character believes that to be himself, to follow his dreams, he must give up acting to pursue the art of hip hop. It doesn't matter that this isn't the true desire in Phoenix's physical reality, because it is the true desire of the character in the film. Every protagonist has a desire. This is another reminder from Adaptation's McKee.

The protagonist in I'm Still Here goes about his journey in an important setting: the real world. Camera phones, blogs and real human eyes are perceiving this performance piece not as such, but as an actual man who has lost his mind. Have they been tricked by Phoenix? Not really. Because his performance was intended for the film all along. The final product needed real camera phones, real blogs and real human eyes. The character wanted to take a journey of self-discovery, not simply trick consumers of popular media. How can you discover your self if not in the setting of real world?

Unfortunately, the point was missed by most critics. They felt tricked. They thought this was some sort of attempt at a post-Andy Kaufman stunt. But where Andy made his trickery a 24/7/365 gig, Phoenix was only playing a single role for a short amount of time. Andy was also a comedian. Phoenix is not. Big, big difference.

I'm Still Here is a movie about embracing individual reality. Did the Phoenix character find what he was looking for? That's for the viewer to interpret. But the more important question to ask is, are we on similar pursuits? Are we being true to ourselves, or are we fooling ourselves? What does it mean to be an actor? What does it look like when we're faking it?

Blood Into Wine asks these same questions, and self-discovery is also at the film's core. But this film lets the forgeries roam freely. Tim and Eric open the film as the hosts of a fake talk show called Interesting Things, in which they ask Maynard questions about his winery. Right at the start, real and fake are colliding in a meta-mock world that can only exist in cinema.

Throughout the film, recurring disorientation pummels the viewer by way of new age healers, comedians and gag scenes which cause us to question the non-fiction aspect of the whole thing. Everything that is intentionally supposed to look real, (the wineries, interviews, product designs, etc.) all looks convincingly real.

Is it really real though? There are staged scenes, that is certain. But where is the reality?

By the end, just when we think that there really might be a winery in Arizona ran by Maynard James Keenan, he looks at the camera and says, "Who knows what happened when the camera was off? We could have set up this whole thing. This could all be bullshit... As soon as the camera's on, people act different. That's the nature of reality TV. This may not be how I am." Why would he even need to say that if everything is real? Because this is a meta-mock. Its joke is on itself. It knows that it's not reality. And yet, there is still communicable life and inspirational power in those recorded sounds and images. The viewer is in real existential reality, but that LCD/Netflix mirror in front of us is there to help us question ourselves.

As the father of meta-mock (Herzog) propounded: "Ecstatic truth. I've always tried to strive for a much deeper truth in the images, in cinema, in storytelling, on a screen, so whether I've achieved it or not remains to be seen..." Only through subjective eyes may we see it. And in this way, welcome our newest film genre--the meta-mock.